Ahmet T. Kuru - Execution for a Facebook post? Why blasphemy is a capital offense in some Muslim countries
Junaid Hafeez, a university lecturer in Pakistan, had been imprisoned for six
years when he was sentenced to death in December 2019. The charge:
blasphemy, specifically insulting Prophet Muhammad on Facebook. Pakistan has the
world’s second strictest blasphemy laws after Iran, according to U.S. Commision on International Religious Freedom. Hafeez, whose death
sentence is under appeal, is one of about 1,500 Pakistanis charged
with blasphemy, or sacrilegious speech, over the last three decades. No
executions have taken place.
But since 1990 70 people
have been murdered by mobs and vigilantes who accused them of
insulting Islam. Several people who defend the accused have been killed, too,
including one of Hafeez’s lawyers and two high-level politicians who publicly opposed the
death sentence of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted for verbally insulting
Prophet Muhammad. Though Bibi was acquitted in 2019, she fled Pakistan.
Of 71 countries that criminalize blasphemy, 32 are
majority Muslim. Punishment and enforcement of these laws varies. Blasphemy is
punishable by death in Iran, Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia. Among non-Muslim-majority cases, the harshest blasphemy laws are in Italy, where the maximum
penalty is three years in prison. Half of the world’s 49
Muslim-majority countries have additional laws banning apostasy, meaning people may be punished
for leaving Islam. All countries with apostasy laws are Muslim-majority
except India. Apostasy is often charged
along with blasphemy. This class of religious
laws is quite popular in some Muslim countries. According to a 2013 Pew survey, about 75% of respondents in Southeast Asia, the
Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia favor making sharia, or Islamic
law, the official law of the land. Among those who
support sharia, around 25% in Southeast Asia, 50% in the Middle East and North
Africa, and 75% in South Asia say they support “executing those who leave
Islam” – that is, they support laws punishing apostasy with death...
The ulema and the
state: My 2019 book “Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment” traces the
root of blasphemy and apostasy laws in the Muslim world back to a historic
alliance between Islamic scholars and government. Starting around the
year 1050, certain Sunni scholars of law and theology, called the “ulema,”
began working closely with political rulers to challenge what they considered to
be the sacrilegious influence of Muslim
philosophers on society. Muslim philosophers
had for three centuries been making major contributions to mathematics, physics and medicine. They developed the Arabic number system used across the West today and
invented a forerunner of the modern camera. The conservative ulema
felt that these philosophers were inappropriately influenced by Greek philosophy and Shia Islam against Sunni beliefs. The most prominent
in consolidating Sunni orthodoxy was the brilliant and respected Islamic
scholar Ghazali, who died in the year 1111. In several influential books still widely read today, Ghazali
declared two long-dead leading Muslim philosophers, Farabi and Ibn Sina, apostates for their unorthodox views
on God’s power and the nature of resurrection. Their followers, Ghazali
wrote, could be punished with death... read more:
see also
Mahmoud
Mohammed Taha (Author
of Second Message of Islam); also known as Ustaz Mahmoud Mohammed
Taha, was a Sudanese religious thinker and trained engineer. He
was executed for apostasy at the age of 76 by Gaafar
Nimeiry. (See his Court statement)
